I feel very open to chance
Dispatch from Writing with the Seasons - November 2023
Welcome to this short dispatch from ‘Writing with the Seasons’. If you’re not already a premium subscriber, you can sign up here to enjoy our essays and audio courses as they unfold season by season.
We welcomed Sheila Heti to Write & Shine’s Autumn Salon last week and it was wonderful! A searching, inventive writer, Sheila is the author of eleven books, including ‘Pure Colour’, ‘Motherhood’ and ‘How Should a Person Be?’ The New York Times named her as a writer shaping the way we read and write fiction today.
‘Alphabetical Diaries’ is her latest book. Sheila gathered her diaries over ten years and arranged the sentences in order from A-Z. She shaped the piece from 500,000 words to 50,000, considering it an experiment, just playing and cutting. Asking herself what it could be. Slowly, the book took on a form. Evolving with poetic progress between sentences and interesting juxtapositions. All this took 14 years of thinking and editing.
A book, for Sheila, is elastic. It can change shape, form and focus over time. She says:
I feel very open to how chance or how events in my life might shift what I’m writing or what the book is about.
Sinead Gleeson called ‘Alphabetical Diaries’ an “ode to the sentence.” It shows us the power of a single line. I loved it too! Ordinary moments next to heartbreaking reflections, full of unexpected rhythms and ideas. It works together beautifully.
Sheila Heti’s ‘Alphabetical Diaries’ is out next year! Writing with the Seasons is brought to you by Gemma Seltzer, founder of Write & Shine, a programme of morning writing workshops and online courses. Autumn artwork by Yani Putrii.